Let Your Guests Announce Their Arrival in Style with This Piano Doorbell
Makestreme designed this piano doorbell that lets visitors announce their arrival by tickling the ivories.
Doorbells serve a very practical purpose; you want to know when someone is at your door, but you don’t want guests to have to bruise their knuckles by hammering at the wood with their fists. But just because doorbells are practical devices, that doesn’t mean they have to be purely utilitarian — your grandma’s novelty doorbell that plays a muzak version of “Margaritaville” is proof of that. However, there is no reason to limit your visitors in that way. Instead, you can let your guests announce their arrival in style with this piano doorbell.
This is exactly what it sounds like: a piano keyboard in place of the usual doorbell button. Mounting an entire 88-key piano next to a front door is a bit extreme, so this just has five keys (three white, two black). But you may be surprised by how much melodic variation you can achieve with only five notes — just ask Green Day. When a visitor presses a key, the corresponding note plays through a speaker inside the home. That is a lot more fun than a regular doorbell chime, assuming your friends aren’t the types to get obnoxious with it (they definitely are).
There are many, many ways one could achieve this functionality, but Makestreme kept things simple. The piano keys have micro limit switches acting as buttons and their wires go through the exterior wall to the rest of the device, mounted inside. Makestreme set the switches up with a resistor ladder, so a microcontroller can detect any button press through a single analog pin.
The interior part of the device contains a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32 development board, which pumps out audio through a small amplifier module to a speaker. Power comes from a wall wart with a USB-C cable. Each note is a recorded sample converted into a format stored directly as part of the firmware code. That isn’t the best approach for long audio files or when quality is a big concern, but it works well enough for this application.
One benefit of that method, compared to synthesizing notes, is that the sounds can be anything. They don’t have to replicate piano notes. We’re sure that many of our readers would have a field day with the possibilities there.
But even sticking with traditional piano sounds, this is a fun project with about a million times more whimsy than a regular doorbell.